Advertising has been an integral part of multimedia content from radio and television broadcasts to movies. Advertising has been implemented in many forms with multimedia content, including a single sponsor paying for large blocks of advertising time before and after multimedia presentations or selling short advertisement times to multiple sponsors throughout a multimedia presentation. Another less invasive method of advertising is through product placement. Product placement is the use of real commercial products by characters in multimedia content. For example, a character may use a commercially available cell phone in the midst of a television show. The use of product placement in multimedia content is presented in such a way as to evoke a response from a potential customer that may be associated with the product in order to encourage the purchase of the product.
With the advent of digital video recorders (DVRs) customers now have a new level of control over their viewing experience. DVRs may be used to record multimedia content and give a user control over how the content is played back or presented through controls such as pause, rewind, and fast forward. The increased control gained by using a DVR has enabled viewers to fast forward past advertisements. However, it has been found that some viewers actually rewind to watch or re-watch commercials that are of particular interest to them.
Through monitoring how users control their viewing experience on DVRs, it can be seen that viewers are not opposed to commercials in their entirety, but would prefer to only view advertisements that are of particular interest to them. Further, advertisements to date have typically been static presentations of commercials or product placements with little or no way for a potential customer to interact with a product and act on the emotional or other appeal associated with the presentation of the product.